Development of application programs is a complex process and the speed and efficiency of deployment of production versions of new software kits can be a concern to the business. Thus there is a continual pressure to speed up software release cycles with the number of releases in a given period tending to increase as time progresses. Furthermore software kits themselves are becoming more complex with requirements to deploy them in production environments including distributed network systems such as cloud computing systems. Prior to release, software kits may have to be tested on deployment environments representing these different production environments. Software developers may be faced with short timescales of just weeks to implement multiple software kits. Software testing pipelines for a build version of a software kit may involve detailed tracking and manual documentation of results of multiple testing stages. Modifications to software kits can range from changes to a single code component of a software kit to completely new software kits.
Certain parts of the software kit development process can be readily automated, for example, updates made by software developers to code components of the software kit may be coordinated by a collaborative code development program having a code repository that may be commonly accessed by a team of developers. A process known as continuous integration can be used to rapidly test and report on changes to source code components of a software kit soon after they are added to the code repository. However, a release management stage of the software development process, which follows on from successfully building a software kit from its code components, involves testing the build version in a deployment environment and this can represent a bottleneck in the overall development process due to the involvement in the release approval process of quality assurance input from multiple different people including software developers, engineers and managers. The release stage of the software development process may rely upon laborious checklists and time-consuming manual gathering of documentation of release criteria associated with the software kit deployment testing.